SpamBrain symptoms — diagnose your site.

Template-level symptoms — the v0.6 failure modes

v0.6 introduces three template-scoped symptom patterns that flat-URL audits cannot surface:

• Thin pages on a template. When the uniformity score for a template exceeds 0.8, ≥8 of 10 sampled pages are thin or boilerplate-heavy. The template verdict is critical even if the rest of the site is healthy. This is the most common reason a pSEO directory loses ranking for its high-volume template while smaller niche templates stay indexed.
• Cross-template duplication. spam/near-duplicate is corpus-wide — it compares pages across all templates. A site where the /category/:slug and /listing/:slug templates produce near-identical pages (different slug, same body) will fire this rule even when each template in isolation looks fine.
• One bad template among many. This is the v0.6-specific failure mode: a site with 8 healthy templates and 1 broken one gets a critical site verdict if the broken template covers ≥5% of URLs. The broken template is the "top driver" shown on the site summary. Flat-URL audits miss this because the broken URLs get diluted by the volume of healthy ones.

How to triage a SpamBrain hit

The 5 most-searched symptoms below all share the same triage shape: identify the symptom you're seeing in Google Search Console (impressions cliff, CTR collapse, indexed-but-not-served, sudden manual action, or a slow Core-Web-Vitals-driven decay), then map it to the rule cluster that explains it (spam/* for the March 5, 2024 scaled-content-abuse pattern, links/* for the May 7, 2024 site-reputation-abuse pattern, tech/* for the slow CWV decay, content/* for thin-intent drift), and then run the audit to confirm which specific template and rules are actually firing. Skipping the triage step is the most common reason teams burn weeks on the wrong fix.

Median observed recovery time for sites that fix the underlying rule violations is 30–90 days — Google needs to recrawl, rescore through SpamBrain, and let the classifier's rolling signal stabilize. Manual actions surface faster (usually one reconsideration cycle, 1–2 weeks) but require a documented fix in the request. Algorithmic suppression has no notification and no reconsideration channel; the only confirmation is watching impressions return in GSC's Search Status Dashboard and the per-URL Performance report.

Why bottom-funnel diagnostic content survives AI Overviews

A common worry in 2026 is that AI Overviews will summarize away the informational long tail. That's broadly true for top-of-funnel "what is X" content, where the LLM can synthesize a one-paragraph answer from three sources and the user never clicks. It's not true for interactive diagnostic content like the pages below — when the workflow requires the reader to look at their own GSC chart, classify what they're seeing, and make a branching decision, the LLM can't condense the experience into a snippet. That's why pseolint's symptom pages are deliberately structured as branching diagnostic flows rather than "ultimate guides."

The May 7, 2024 site-reputation-abuse policy in particular drove a wave of manual actions against domains hosting third-party parasite-SEO content under their authority — if you bought a coupon subdomain, ran a sponsored-content network, or hosted affiliate landing pages under a high-DR root, it's worth running the doorway-page detector and reading the doorway-pattern symptom page before assuming the cause is something else. SpamBrain treats parasite content as a domain-level signal, not a URL-level one.

Triage philosophy here borrows from incident-response runbooks rather than ranking-recovery playbooks: observability first, hypothesis second, irreversible remediation last. Each branch below stays falsifiable — if the diagnostic checks come back clean, the symptom isn't the one you thought it was, and you escalate to the next differential rather than committing to a fix.